We drove farther than average to visit the New England Lobster Market & Eatery [Yelp], but the pleasant outdoor space they’ve created a hundred yards or so from the shore of San Francisco Bay combined with a very credible lobster roll made it worthwhile. The potato chips are also excellent.

For the younger ages of the California competitive leagues the boys have played in, sides are eight players each, and don’t move to the adult 11-a-side game until the spring season of U11. Ben is in his second season of 11-a-side, while Nathaniel has a few seasons of 8-a-side still to go. Since we try to be informed spectators of each, I thought it would be interesting to comment on the 8v8 formations as they relate to the adult formations.

Wikipedia’s coverage of soccer (“association football”) topics is extensive—covering players, club and national teams, tournament histories, and aspects of the game. The article on soccer formations gives an overview of both the historical development of formations and a summary of the current common formations. We’ll use it as a basis for identifying key adult formations; the article covers many more.

For formations with three rows, defenders–midfielders–forwards, an 8 player formation can be derived from an 11 player formation by subtracting one player from each row. Since the four row formations are refinements of the midfielders into a pair of sub ranks, we treat formations like the 4–2–3–1 and 4–3–1–2, as variations of the 4–5–1 and 4–4–2, respectively.

4–4–2 → 3–3–1

You’ll see a lot of teams playing the 3–3–1, as it’s the recommended 8v8 formation in the US Soccer curriculum. Although your striker has to work hard to apply pressure on his or her own, he or she benefits by being the focus of attacks up the middle. This formation has natural width and a well-populated midfield, although I haven’t seen many teams that encourage their outside defenders to make runs forward. (So we see many conservative 3–3–1 teams.) When your team moves up, you’ll find the 4–4–2 is one of the recommended 11v11 formations for U12 in the US Soccer curriculum. (Your striker may find the transition challenging, as they will have to pair with a peer, rather than be the single focus.)

4–3–3 → 3–2–2

The 4–3–3 is the other recommended 11v11 formation for U12 in the US Soccer curriculum, so it’s natural to hope that it’s 8v8 reduced form would be easy to use as well. However, the midfield and forward part of the resulting formation is narrow, meaning that it’s easy for opponents to find space to work through; against a 3–3–1, the 3–2–2 is at a numerical disadvantage in the midfield. I’m not sure I’ve seen any team line up in a 3–2–2.

4–5–1 → 3–4–0

Ben’s team in 2012 ended up playing in a 3–4–0 for much of their spring season. I believe what the coach was trying to address was the forwards’ tendencies to not come back on defense once possession was lost. The drawback is that, without a single striker occupying the defense (to maintain length), the opposing defenders can come forward and capture cleared balls easily. It’s also unclear which of the midfield is responsible for pressuring the opponent, although teams with good individual defensive instincts or training might enjoy the flexibility of having the closest player apply the pressure.

3–4–3 → 2–3–2

Wigan Athletic under Martinez in recent years stood out in the Premier League for playing a 3–4–3. Its reduction, the 2–3–2, might work as a tactic for a 3–3–1 team trying to bring more offense to bear in the final portion of a game. The two defender line will have to be very strong, or your keeper will be very busy.

3–5–2 → 2–4–1

Nathaniel’s team often plays in a 2–4–1 since they have a number of outside midfielders willing to run from goal line to goal line and cover the opposing outside forward when on defense. Risky like the 2–3–2 if the defenders aren’t strong and coordinated, although the extra player in midfield should stop the opponent from finding overloads as easily as they might against a 2–3–2.

5–m–n → 4–(m-1)–(n-1)

I haven’t seen anyone playing four defenders in 8v8, because we haven’t seen anyone willing to give up most of their offensive chances by clamping down defensively. (Most youth tournaments award points for goals scored, in addition to the game result, so losing 2–3 can be better than tying 0–0. In other areas, you might see youth teams happy to draw…)

Translating per-position comments

If you are trying to describe each position’s responsibilities in an 8v8, the key difference between the responsibilities in the adult formation and in the reduction comes from the change in each row from an odd to an even number of players. That can be made even simpler: the even-numbered rows need to be very clear about how to divide their coverage of the field (left-right or left-center left-center right-right), while the odd-numbered rows should find this allocation clear (solo or left-center-right). For some formations, positions are otherwise almost unchanged: the wide players in the 3–3–1 have the same responsibility to go forward as their counterparts in the 4–4–2. But, much like our striker in the 3–3–1 must learn to coordinate with a second striker in the 4–4–2, so will the central defender in a 3–m–n mesh with a partner in a 4–(m+1)–(n+1).

While retrieving a few items from the car I parked out front, I heard the burst of a woodpecker tapping, and grabbed my camera (with an 80 – 320 mm lens for soccer) to see if I could get a good enough picture for identification. The camera rig was much more suitable than the camcorder I used to snap a merlin in 2005.

Ben looked at the photo and worked through his options in the AMNH Birds of North America. Based on the range, the barred back, and red crown, he thinks it’s an example of Nuttall’s Woodpecker (but it could be a Ladder-backed or a hybrid of the two).

This serene moment of observation ended when the squirrel in that same tree, directly above me, dropped a walnut on my head.

I managed to get back out on the soccer field, after the two field sessions of the Class E clinic and a weekend in Reno shuttling the boys around. Even though I had worked in some accelerations into my runs, I tweaked my right hamstring at the clinic and so I knew today wasn’t going to be great for sprints. (The hardest part about the clinic was participating in all of the other students’ demonstration drills—about 13 hours of drills.) So, today was about playing smart.

The summary was

miCoach summary, 2013-06-30

The duration suggests a combination of a brief warmup, at least compared to 9 June, and 40 minute halves instead of full 45s. (It’s a 90F weekend.) Since I couldn’t go all out in the sprints, I made sure to cruise a bit more to get into good position, which is reflected in the high intensity distance being about the same as the previous game.

Another useful graph from the miCoach soccer report is the timeline:

miCoach timeline, 2013-06-30

Looks like I sat out for a long substitution in the first half; I’ll have to call for a sub sooner. This week’s goal: further hamstring recovery.

After talking with one of the dads on Nathaniel’s team, I decided to start playing soccer again, this time in the PAASL Men’s B division. (I played a single season of AYSO Adult League in fall of 2011, but work got a bit too busy. Before that there’s an 18 year hiatus.) For running and lifting, various Android apps—CardioTrainer and Strong Log—have given me enough feedback data to adjust training plans, but for soccer, it’s a bit awkward to carry a phone on your shirt sleeve. Since I didn’t want to play without some form of instrumentation, I began to research.

The only single player system for soccer I’ve found is Adidas miCoach, which consists of a pod that slips into a recess under the insole of your left boot, a receiver, a synchronization program, and a web application which provides the reporting. I chose the Mac/PC package, where the receiver is a USB device, to use with my laptop. Since I hadn’t played in a while, I was curious to see what the summary was. When I got home, I ran the sync app, and logged into the miCoach site. The summary panel from my first game, which includes the warmup, is below:

miCoach summary, 2013-06-09

Even these five numbers were illuminating: distance travelled, at just under 4 miles, was comfortable, given my regular runs. But I don’t do a lot of speed work, and the demonstrations and touches I perform with Ben’s team are low intensity, and the second half—except for one or two runs—was much more of a challenge in terms of summoning speed. (It feels like a brief incantation is required at my age. Twenty years ago speed was always available…) I’ll make sure to add more accelerations when I’m out on the roads, or just suck it up and run some wind sprints.

miCoach gives more detailed results than that summary; I’ll show a few of these in future posts. No measurements this weekend, as I’m attending the Class E coaching clinic.

wordpress.com annual report: I turned WordPress.com’s Jetpack on in the fall; this morning I received their generated report for the past few months. #1 this year? The sauce spoon—not a technical post.

@tomww points out that the
Spec Files Extra (SFE) repository is packaging recent node.js versions, built with their GCC 4.6.3 compilers. That means installation is as simple as a pair of pkg(5) invocations

dilshod/xlsx2csv · GitHub “Converts xslx xml excel files to csv format. It is fast, and works for huge xlsx files.” And works well enough to stop me from custom-coding a handler for each spreadsheet I get handed.

Generating Poisson random values — The Endeavour “Below is an algorithm that has expected run time independent of the argument λ. The algorithm is fairly simple, though it takes a moderate amount of theoretical justification to explain. It goes back to 1979 and so may not the most efficient algorithm available. It is definitely not the most efficient algorithm if you need to generate a large number of samples using the same parameter λ.”

More specifically, these instructions should let you build node 0.8.16, the current stable version, on oi_151a5:

$ uname -a
SunOS cooler 5.11 oi_151a5 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris

(cooler is in its seventh year of service, having run many builds of Solaris, OpenSolaris, and, now, OpenIndiana.) First, you’ll need a GCC 4.x compiler. If you attempt to use the 3.4.3 gcc compiler, you’ll get

in the output from your failed build. So, use the Illumos GCC 4.4.4 build, which you can install via

$ sudo pkg install developer/illumos-gcc developer/gnu-binutils

which led to the installation on my system, of 3 packages, and a total of 56.9MiB of content downloaded. Include these new tools in your path for the build:

$ export PATH=/opt/gcc/4.4.4/bin:/usr/gnu/bin:$PATH

To help the node build find the appropriate Standard C++ library for linking, we set the linker run path, via the environment. (By having a correct run path, our node binary won’t need LD_LIBRARY_PATH to be set to pick up libstdc++.so.6.) We can then configure, and issue the (GNU) make to start a build:

And now you have a working node.js for your OpenIndiana system. npm is installed as well, so you can begin downloading the modules needed for your development. (If you’re running OmniOS, it looks like the “managed services” repository includes a pkg(5)-installable node.js package, so you can install that interpreter directly. Maybe that’s what cooler should run next.)